A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

This is not PRISM - but a different system. The slides are damning, as always.

It validates claims made by Edward Snowden, and makes it clear that US government officials have been lying all along. There's no court order required for any of this - in a supposedly modern democracy. Crazy.

I know this can always change, just sayin. when i first heard about prism or whatever it was called in the 90's (from a buddy who ran a few regional ISP's) we would put a threatening string of text in our email sigs to try to expose the system. for a couple of years i put something like "it's not like I want to kill the president " in my email sig, and I have yet to be questioned by the men in black.

Why would anyone question you over that? Also, there's no gain in chasing down common criminals. To be clear, by "gain" I mean financial or political gain.

Clearly the biggest concern people have is privacy. They simply don't like the idea of absolutely everything they do being recorded/documented. Nobody likes their secrets revealed even if their secrets are lame or cause no harm. Nobody likes feeling like they're being spied on, which IS what's happening by definition. Nobody likes being lied to. Nobody likes the idea that the biggest enemy to freedom, rights, and the constitution, is the government itself. What's actually done with all this information, documentation, records, logs, etc. is secondary and can only make an already horrible situation worse. And the most scary thing about all this is that neither you, I, nor any other citizen can do anything to stop it.

yeah i agree with you. i'm not on facebook and because of this very reason and it is a bit of a pain in the azz to not play along with the digital revolution. but i know facebook, beyond profit, cannot be trusted with my personal info.

i'm not as concerned that they are 'watching' us, because since the moment we invented electronic communication there has been a way to view and soon after record it for nefarious uses. it's the searchable scalable database of our lives that we don't know exists that is worrisome.

i'm more concerned about it being a top-secret, who knows what's going on sort of thing. snowden did good i think. because this is a long-overdue discussion all societies need to have about privacy, since the machines are to the point of tracking us nearly everywhere doing nearly everything.

i'd like to see some of you hackers get to work showing us citizens exactly what they have on us. i'm a database programmer so i know what they can do with that data, but i don't know what they have, or from what sources, in the first place.